I went to this cave in France once where some people were living 20,000 years ago. The whole tour was in French, which I don't speak, so I may have gotten some of the details wrong, but...
These people were hunter-gatherers, apparently, which sounds like a pretty tough way to live. I doubt it produced much "surplus." Despite this, there were something like fragments from 40,000 flutes. Apparently, the cave people would sit in the dark blow on their flutes. A lot.
Now, the agriculturists on the shores of the Indian Ocean, as described in the book, sound pretty different from this. They apparently only do the growing of crops thing, and haven't time to do much of anything else...apparently they never produced anything like flutes.
My experience of humans is that they're always fidgeting with their hands, making something. Even now, wielding our cursed smart phones, I'll wager most people make something with all their little taps. We're all makers to some extent. Almost like we can't help it.
Even your average dirt-grubbing peon had a lot of hours hunkered down in their shack or tent or whatever. They didn't have TVs, so maybe they were making something useful.
So what am I saying? I'm saying there's always something extra. We probably exist in a monoculture now more than ever, but before the industrial revolution, seems like the people in the next town/village/cave over probably always had something different than what the people in your town had. And we wants what we don't have, doesn't we?
All of which is to say: I don't think there ever was anything like this:
agriculturally dominant societies of the past could only have a few of those... exchanging surplus in one region for surplus in another thus had two capitalists trade with one another, but remaining a very small portion of society, isolated and existing only in connection to their counterparts in other societies.
Seems more likely to me that pretty much everybody was always trading at least a little something. Why should we treat the "capitalist" as a difference in kind rather than degree? The fabled long-distance trader cum accumulator cum Capitalist is maybe just slightly further out on the risk curve.
So, I don't like the "archipelagos" metaphor. It's too discreet. I don't see why I should treat capitalism as distinct in kind from cave people trading flutes with cave people who live across the valley.
I went to this cave in France once where some people were living 20,000 years ago. The whole tour was in French, which I don't speak, so I may have gotten some of the details wrong, but...
These people were hunter-gatherers, apparently, which sounds like a pretty tough way to live. I doubt it produced much "surplus." Despite this, there were something like fragments from 40,000 flutes. Apparently, the cave people would sit in the dark blow on their flutes. A lot.
Now, the agriculturists on the shores of the Indian Ocean, as described in the book, sound pretty different from this. They apparently only do the growing of crops thing, and haven't time to do much of anything else...apparently they never produced anything like flutes.
My experience of humans is that they're always fidgeting with their hands, making something. Even now, wielding our cursed smart phones, I'll wager most people make something with all their little taps. We're all makers to some extent. Almost like we can't help it.
Even your average dirt-grubbing peon had a lot of hours hunkered down in their shack or tent or whatever. They didn't have TVs, so maybe they were making something useful.
So what am I saying? I'm saying there's always something extra. We probably exist in a monoculture now more than ever, but before the industrial revolution, seems like the people in the next town/village/cave over probably always had something different than what the people in your town had. And we wants what we don't have, doesn't we?
All of which is to say: I don't think there ever was anything like this:
Seems more likely to me that pretty much everybody was always trading at least a little something. Why should we treat the "capitalist" as a difference in kind rather than degree? The fabled long-distance trader cum accumulator cum Capitalist is maybe just slightly further out on the risk curve.
So, I don't like the "archipelagos" metaphor. It's too discreet. I don't see why I should treat capitalism as distinct in kind from cave people trading flutes with cave people who live across the valley.